Today’s Word: “definitions”

Today’s Word: “spilling”

Is this right?

“Right now is the perfect time to do something imperfectly.”

The phrase stares neatly up at me from a glossy designer sticker at my local plant shop. 

The feelings these words cast into my body are anything but neat. They flutter around in here (I hold a hand to my chest) with a wild excitement that could actually be panic—I can’t tell. There’s something about them that feels like a cliff’s edge: which could be thrilling, as long as I have on the right equipment. I can’t tell if I’m equipped. 

The automatic Dyson hand dryer in the Starbucks bathroom is pasted across the front with instructions for employee hand washing. Not once, but twice, the steps for proper hand washing are pictured involving paper towels. There is not a paper towel in sight. I stand there for a moment with dripping hands (I’m not so broken that this paralyzes me) (yet). Thanks to the step-by-step, pictured sequence, I know what I should do. Given the provided equipment, I know what I will do. In this brief disembodied moment, the disconnect between these two looms large, a perfect metaphor for my life: The instructions for accomplishing the task are right there. They are very clear. They are very simple. Literally anyone could do this. 

A question materializes in the air around me as I hold my hands under the hand dryer. Is this right? It seems to attach itself to everything for me these days (free of charge): Is this right? I travel around with a whole collection, as if gathering this query is a delightful hobby. It’s hard to shake it when the consequences of the question are so nebulous. Maybe it matters not at all. Maybe it matters the most. Roll the dice. 

For the past couple of months, I have been dogged by that question, paired with this sinking feeling that everything is really not going to be alright, after all. There has been so much change in my world, and my inner self is way way behind in making adjustments to meet the new. I keep trying on different versions of reality, starting with the ones already in my closet. Does this still fit? Is this right? And then maybe that last one was right and I already rejected it. Start at the beginning again. 

It doesn’t help that I’ve had very little practice in my life listening to, let alone trusting, my intuition. I don’t know the sound of her voice and, worse than that, I’ve learned over the course of my years to distrust her voice as that of something/someone/anything other than myself. No, not just any “something,” but specifically Evil, bent on tripping up my every step. That viewpoint certainly hasn’t imbued me with great confidence in my decision-making ability.  

I desperately need that inner mooring of self confidence because change has shot my stability through with holes, and this sail won’t hold wind anymore. Any movement in any direction feels totally out of my control. I would like more power over my situation, please. Is that wrong? The narrative about control that I’m used to swimming in is that it is, in fact, wrong—wrong to want it; wrong to pursue it; wrong to wield it. Wanting and using it makes you a rigid, selfish, grasping, untrusting person. But when you are standing on a ledge and you want to live and there’s unsteady ground and a stiff breeze and a host of other elements pushing and pulling against you, control is necessary, right? You need to be able to rely on the grip of your feet and the inner muscle control over the balance of your form. You want there to be power in your arms and legs and control over your interaction with your environment. That can’t be wrong. That has to be…natural. Can one build confidence without control? Not over everything, but over some things.

I want to claim the holiness of control. Holiness, after all, is simply something dedicated to the divine. Something sacred, which is to say connected to God or dedicated to her. And control (would I lose all of your respect if I admitted that I am Googling definitions? Should I care? IS THAT RIGHT? ) is “the power to influence or direct people’s behavior or the course of events.” Even single-celled organisms control their movement—they don’t just float around waiting for something to make all their choices for them. Can’t that movement be dedicated to the divine as the worship of living actively in the forms we’ve been gifted (these minds, these bodies, this world)? Yet, fear stirred up by a host of unknowns has me tangled up inside, so tight I can’t move in this dense jungle of vast possibilities.

Oh, I want to cry for a whole afternoon. I want to scream. I want to violently push out of my body all the what ifs that are paralyzing me and slam the door shut on them. I want to be able to hear my own voice. To want something and know that I want it and then do it and then be O.K. with what was done. I want to think of the things that result from my choices as just chosen story lines. This one over that. Not “the right one” or “the wrong one.” I want to wield my own power like a machete—pick a direction and carve a path through the jungle one step at a time. I want to move my feet forward even knowing there’s so much I don’t know about what lies ahead.

I see now that I’m talking about reclaiming control and surrendering control in tandem. Isn’t that just like me. Maybe they aren’t so different, those two. Maybe there’s one coin and these are the two sides and they exist at the same time, flipping one to the other and back again in a sun-catching kind of way through the tumble of time. They are holy (wholly?) together. 

Maybe that’s why that casually printed phrase grabbed me so violently at first sight that I would pay $4 to take it home. “Right now is the perfect time to do something imperfectly”—both are present at the same time here: movement and surrender. In short: Make a choice, and then live with it.

Here’s me, today, making a choice and living with it. 

The Mystery Experiment

Maybe hiking is a fairly safe and beautiful way to encounter mystery. Mystery is one of those things that I want to befriend but I’m always kind of giving the side-eye. 

ME "What are You doing here?" 
MYSTERY "I'm always here. This is where I live." 
ME "Well, go stand in the corner and don’t touch anything." 

It never obeys, like a dopey dog that is just following its nature in an unaggressive way. 

ME "Put that down!"
MYSTERY "But I just—" 
ME "No! Go back to your corner and leave my [insert precious thing here] alone!" 

I tend to think of mystery as a maleficent force. But could it be benevolent? Shrouding me from the painful unknown that I’m not strong enough to face just yet. Shielding me from the sheer mind-exp­loding force of knowledge the world contains so I don’t—well, explode? I often mentally return to something a friend and former colleague told me when I was trying to choose between two job offers. 

ME "I just want to know which one I should take! I want to know what the implications and consequences are of choosing one over the other so I can make the right choice!"

I was adamant. But she just wisely and calmly proposed that if we knew every­thing about what was ahead of us—we wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. 

I think I can understand that perspective most in the context of parenthood. If I knew with clarity what physical and relational dangers lie ahead for my kids, I could­n’t make space for its flying-while-building nature that requires of kids some ownership, free­dom, autonomy, and opportunity to build self-reliance and confidence and make choices that is ne­cessary to make them fully funct­ioning adults in the future. No—I would for sure lock them in a padded room and only let th­em out for hugs and kisses and it would be out of love. 

Being in nature is practicing partnership with mystery.

What's out there? What will I encounter? Will there be danger? Injury? Tragedy? What kind of snake is that?

But also: What will I disc­over? Uncover? Observe? Learn? Be amazed by? What kind of snake is that!

We have some choices in nature exploration—maybe more than the average life situation. We have some autonomy. We pick where we will go, for how long and how far and in what conditions. We choose what to wear and carry with us (and what to leave behind). We can arm ourselves with a few tools and some knowledge. When we nav­igate the wild—not just cultivated, manicured parks and lawns, though that's a great start!—we are being equipped to navigate the mystery that is Life. It's good practice and it's relatively safe. It builds appreciation for the unknown. Its beauty and majesty astounds and changes, as well as its dangers and challenges. Maybe adventuring in the woods is now and can continue to be a method of exercising my muscles for encountering mystery. 

Here’s the part that I hate the most: I can only go as far as my limits allow. I may long to see the world from the vantage of that snowcapped peak in the distance, but I am not equipped for that journey, and it may not even be accessible for any human, regardless of skill. I can desire, long for, even start up the slope, but my limits will ha­ve the last say. I can choose to ignore them and kill myself with the climb or I can concede that it is a mystery I will not uncover. 

I feel like I often encounter such peaks in rela­tionships with other people. I long to scale the summit but there's only so far I can go. I admit I often would rather kill myself making the ascent than relinguish to the fact that I don’t have access to that mystery…unless the mountain offers a stair­way. The not-knowing between me and other people really scares me, especially if it’s someone I love. What are they thinking about me/us? What do they want? What path can I take (sometimes even forge) to uncover what they won’t reveaI? Spoiler alert: you can’t. I hate it. Does my conjecture about mystery apply here, too? That I only get glimpses of what’s between me and other folks because the whole picture of their perspective or perceptions would be blinding or short out my brain or something? 

I know it's not a popular or trendy or easily digestible thought (even for me, saying it right now), but the limits we face are probably mercies. The things that keep us in place or create feelings of uncertainty—the things that seem like they are holding us back, only to find they were staying our feet from walking off a ledge. I think I want to let mystery out of its corner. To think of it as a loving force and trust its movement around the rooms of my life. If it's touching something, I want to learn to leave it alone because it likely has an intuition that is of benefit to me. 

I’m discovering that exploring the wild, alone and with others, is a way of following that intuition—like a trail someone before me has blazed into the forest. I can always choose to go off book, but until I’m ready, this is probably good practice. And it's guaranteed to be full of discovery.

The Balancing Act

I feel comically misshapen by my Enneagram profile sometimes—meaning, it would be funny if it wasn’t such a painful condition. When any criticism—especially serious criticism about core identity—is levied against me, I go into a process not unlike the Rack (yes, the medieval torture device). 

My Ennegram 2 is pulling me towards love and requiring of me whatever needs to happen to give as well as to retain it. It involves an intense battle with vulnerabilities and doubts about my value, worth, and lovability. This seems to be just what it means to be me. I can recognize and strategize how to cope with it in a healthy way, but I can’t seem to fundamentally change that reality. 

My strong 1-Wing throws me into deep and obsessive analysis about the circumstance in question, picking apart the situation and myself to find the imperfection, and to know the “right answer,” because surely every situation has a black and white answer, and I must know and choose the right one! In this process, every criticism is given a great deal of weight.

 I blame the 4 on my arrow line for my hardcore devotion to truth and the agonizing drive to act authentically and to be seen and understood as that Self. It is unbelievably painful when that doesn’t happen, so all the while that I’m seek­ing to make sense of a situation and decide what move to make (one that won’t compromise the love I'm receiving, of course), the 8 on my arrow line is fighting in explosive bouts of indignation as it stands over the woundedness in my heart like a bear over her young. 

It is very disorienting and gives me a real sense of the phrase "bent out of shape.”

I am misshapen. 
I am imperfect.
I am self-serving and prideful and my intentions are impure.  

I have wrestled much with the correlation between my art and the reaction of the all-important Audience. I struggle endlessly with the fact that the Viewer’s opinion holds so much weight for me, despite this exchange of value being an obviously flawed system. No matter how many times I tell myself that I am valuable and my work is beautiful and worthy, the reaction of Audience can undo those words in a heartbeat. I can intend to create and be satisfied with my creation apart from how it is received, but I forever long to hear the words "well done," which effectively mean to me, “you are valuable” or “you are loved.” I can’t hear it enough. I am insecure. I seek that message and often compromise my­self or my art to get it. 

I believe art is the story of a life, so it's no wonder that I feel that drive, that pressure, on all levels of my existence in the world. Do people perceive me as loving? Sincere? Authentic? Generous? Sacrificial hospitable welcoming intelligent creative…worthy?

These are the things I believe to be a part of me and want to be seen by others. One word of doubt or question about these core identifiers sends me into a nose-dive. If folks don’t see these things then what am I?

Not just in art, but in life as a whole, I want to have a foundation that can with­stand the ebbs and flows of public (or my own personal) opinion about my value. I want to stand on unchangeable ground that is not altered at all by outside forces. I know of no firmer place than an identity as a loved child of a God who is herself the embodiment of Love. If that is where I am rooted, then it doesn't really matter what winds blow through my world, and I am free to admit that, in the words of my Anglican liturgy,

“I have sinned in thought, word, and deed. 
By what I have done
and by what I have left undone. 
I have not loved you with my whole heart. 
I have not loved my neighbor as my­self.”

I am still so often caught in this push and pull of self-justification. This endless battle to prove myself right and just and worthy. When I can believe the worthiness factor to be a set and immovable reality, it will no longer be death to admit that it is true or at the very least possible that I have sinned against and hurt others. That I need to apologize and reconcile and renew. 

For most of my years, I have lived a life that was small and quiet. I did not want to do or say anything that would intention­ally or unintentionally lead to damaged love and the need for apology. I was afraid of compromising the love I was receiving and I was prideful. I still am these things, but as I break free into a much more expansive self, daring to take up space and air, they are no longer my only driving forces. The fear that kept my life so muted was not unfounded: the more I stretch out my limbs and run headlong into the world, the more possibility there is of breaking dishes and trampling feelings and taking missteps. There is far more requirement to recognize failure and to mend things. This process is very new to me and—as I suspected all that time beforehand—it is supremely uncomfortable. 

Inhabiting this expanded life is requiring two essential things: 

believing I am unequivocally secure in a love that is untouched by my accomplishments or my failures (it depends on neither, but merely exists)

accepting my imperfections and acting with humility to address the consequences of them.

A beauty of the Enneagram is that activating every part of the unique self at once can create a balanced, geometric shape. For me, I think this looks like fighting to protect the wounded, whether that is others or the child within (8); unapologetically being my authentic self (4) as I live out the big heart and passion­ate service that flows from my core (2); and accepting that the love I seek is mine through the perfection (1) imparted to me through the gift of Christ.

Those faults and flaws people see in me are real.
I have made messes and I have caused wounds.
I am a beautiful, loved Being. Then, now, forever.

“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end."

At the Water’s Edge

Here I am again, back at what feels like the starting place of so many parts of my life, wondering if this really is a track I’m racing around—an endless loop rather than the vast trail into the unknown I thought I was taking. 

With predictable rhythm, I find myself stuck on a metaphor in need of reframing. Who knows what the cause of my melancholy is this week, but it’s strong and persistent. 

I want to forge lasting things. But everywhere I look, I see my work consumed like sandcastles at a day’s end, pulled into the sea and leaving no imprint where they once were. Is the permanence I crave one of those foretaste things—a glimpse into the New Creation, and something I can’t or shouldn’t expect from a world whose greatest predictability is that, like a wicked toddler taking joy in destruction, some­thing is going to come along to demolish beautiful things?

For whatever convergence of reasons, these days find me scouring the coastline for the things over which I have labored. Where are the structures I have formed with these hands? Meaning (outside of metaphor-land) where are the friendships, the art, the lasting impact I have made with the presence of my life in the world? 

I guess there’s a kind of promise in the image of daily renewal. His “mercy is new every morning,” right? The guarantee of the sunrise signals a fresh start each day. But rather than refreshment, I have been feeling dread, wondering if the energy I expend—my life force breathed with determination into the world during my limited stint of mortality—is merely that: wind. Invisible. Fleeting. I feel like there is a kind of theology that demands the embracing of this futility. That implores surrender of human work to the work of the Divine and requires satisfaction to be found there.

I’m not going to dismiss this concept entirely, but I am certain there is more to it than that. We were made physical bodies in a physical world, with choice and tangible impact. It feels like the most natural of things, this longing to build something lasting that bears my mark as a unique being in this created world. We were, after all, not made identical cogs in a mechanized system. We were made infinitely variable—for what reason but that there’s intentional design to our distinctiveness and what it adds to the world? 

I return to the water's edge in my mind. Where’s the truth to be gleaned here? Let the ocean take my efforts into its arms and distribute those grains where it will. Perhaps my work is not ultimately the sandcastles but the coastline. Perhaps what I have done is and will be enough to shape something beautiful. Perhaps this thing that’s being built is not only from my grains of sand but it’s a communal work made alongside my human brothers and sisters, made alongside God. Maybe it’s all true. Or none of it. 

I’m struggling to reframe this metaphor. All I know is that I can’t stagnate on this idea that my hands are shaping only impermanent things that will inevitably disappear—sometimes even before they are finished. I have to believe that there’s a real live breathing touchable thing that I’m creating in this world, and that it can’t be destroyed. 

Return, Laura. Remember: you are “where God happens.” Your body. Your life. Within. It's ultimately your story that is the permanent thing: it is fixed and forming at the same time. I, myself, am the Work, and as an eternal being, I cannot be destroyed. There's both relief and grief in that thought, isn’t there? People often long to change their story, or part of it. We can rethink but not reshape the past. We have power and agency and also limits. Balance. It’s such a mystery, containing all sorts of contradictions. Balance is where surrender of our work meets tangible value of our work and both are true. I believe we have a benevolent Balance-Maker. I must believe it. It’s essential to my survival.  

I have no conclusion to offer, I’m afraid. I’m chasing a thread and I don’t think I’ve reached the end yet. This is merely the current wrestling match of my mind on display. I am working through it. My mind and heart are locked into the fight. What will remain when the dust of combat settles? Well, I suppose My Self. 

A Response to Simple Gifts

There is an old song, 

rediscovered,

that has been trilling through my head like birdspeak. 

It sweeps me up and carries me over and again 

fairylike 

to the garden at its center. 

It is a deep breath

that some unnamed composer

has given me from their own lungs.

Within its stanza, 

I find a ringing truth– 

sounding so purely 

with such determination

that the reverberations push away 

all the unworthy beliefs crowding in on me.

I feel I have tapped into a 

Wellspring:

ancient, clear, sweet. 

Its source is mystical

but its effect is tangible. 

Mysteriously, it is filled with words I

avoid: 

down

seek

bow

bend

turn.

These are all the wrong directions, I think. 

I want to ascend.

To have already found–searching is so wearisome. 

I want to stay above it all–bow and bend are dirty words at best.

And to turn implies delay–to move slowly the way 

thoroughness requires. 

This dancing ditty

dares to suggest

that discovery happens in the 

descending, the

stooping low

and returning again and again to see things anew.

It boldly suggests 

that these low places and simple details

are the places “just right”

where we gain gifts and freedom

delight and love;

where we are seen and not condemned

where we are righted. 

Caught in the circling repetition of this sweet tune,

I marvel at Art’s ability to bring clarity

with such arrestment. 

To use simple materials

to alter firing neurons.

Who but Art would have the courage

to step into the firing range of the mind

to stop the violent exchange. 

Sometimes it is to add ammunition or

to alter tactics.

But sometimes it lays a flower on the field

and brings about a ceasefire.

Wonder and Presence

There’s something undefinable about the parenting life that I find is usually expressed by saying things like “it’s really hard and then they do something really cute and you’re like–awww–and then it’s all better.” I’m coming around to the reality that this place-holder for a deeper, more complicated sentiment is not a particularly satisfying argument. 

I have been experiencing more presence with my kids since I got back from a solo retreat. I feel so oriented to my world right now, and desperate not to lose the peace and balance that has come with that. I have been able to really see my kids lately. To be in the moment with them. It hasn’t made things less up-and-down (emotions are all over the place with two four-year-olds and a six-year-old), but I do feel like a reinforced boat that is riding out the storms while still enjoying the sea. It’s been a mental shift that I’ve wanted to share with people, but I find it hard to articulate. It hasn’t required any particular tangible changes–more of this or less of this or a change in circumstances. It’s been a perspective movement from product to process, from striving to being. I have heard people talk about this very thing my whole life (“Be present! Live in the moment! The only time is now!”), and I have nodded along with how important and true it all is, then promptly stuck to my usual course of always looking ahead and inhabiting the rushing and worrying and struggling that comes along with that. 

Children require a great deal of habitation in the now and that reality in my life has been nudging me again and again to this path of presence. In being more mentally present with my children, I have been able to catch these little moments when they do something that is so very them. So unique to their particular personhood. I have a front row seat to their journey of figuring themselves out: Stretching out in their skin and in their minds and trying new things and being exactly what and who they are in that very moment. Yesterday, they were ninjas and tigers and centipedes and inventors and they built houses to weather tornados and they sat quietly and read in front of the fire. Who knows what else went on in their minds or under their breath as they played make-believe or sat still and were transported by imagination or the feeling of the fire at their back or just all of it in succession or at once. I don’t get to see it all, but I get to see some of this wonderful chaos. And watching it that day, I had this thought: it’s the precious secret of their becoming that is the most compelling argument to live with children. Not just the funny, sweet moments, but also (some of) the wailing, snot-dripping, bloody, feverish, agonizing ones. What keeps parents enthralled through the often mire-ish slog of the work is this tumble of moment after moment of self-discovery that is wondrous–its a mirror of our own inner work, but they often do it so much better. Kids are brand new humans whose newness allows them a tantalizing fluidity for exploring all of the pieces of being that adults tend to become rigid too. We become these forms that aren’t flexible enough to get into all the positions we once could. But sometimes, observing someone else doing it brings back the muscle-memory. 

It’s a secret because these things happen and then the moment is gone. You only get let into its exquisiteness if you were listening closely, and you can never quite convey it to someone else. Sometimes, I can share with my husband something the kids did or said or experienced and it somewhat translates because he also knows them close-up. But regardless of the power of art or words to express moments, the account is always second hand. The true experience is always a little bit of a secret that only you get to hold in your heart. 

For what it’s worth, this is what we are all trying to share on Instagram in pictures that look to other people like identical moments in the lives of our children. What we are seeing, we aren’t really able to document, but it’s a compelling beauty that we are eagerly trying to share. You may capture an image of it, but much of the magic is gone. It was a brilliant firework but the shape of it only remains in smoke.

(Here I am, trying to express something inexpressible. But I never met a concept I wouldn’t try to flesh out with metaphor or some other collection of words, flying like arrows towards a target they never quite hit.) 

There are all kinds of wonders and benefits of living alongside children, but I’m getting off-track. What I mean to say is that what makes parenting so worth it all is this secret joy of watching them be so purely themselves–uninhibited and authentic–and that it happens in real time, something adults spend an awful lot of effort trying to escape. I won’t dwell on it, but this is the place where I admit that for me, this kind of getting-off-track, future-and-achievement-focused living leads to smallness. Irritability. Worry. Despair. Limitedness. Desperation. Longing. And a break-neck speed relying on the dangerous assumption that I’m not going to trip. When I’ve been present lately–really been there in the moment–I have felt the magic of presence with such blissful intensity. It has led to rest and joy. My kids help to lead me into this place. 

How beautiful their minds are–the things they think of. The vastness of them–Oh! Children are so vast. They are these galaxies of self, limited only by the annoyances of the here and now: the basic human needs that they can’t do or reach or understand on their own. I get to help them with those things so that they can get back to being boundless explorers of their time and space and self. Who wants to be confined to this world of having to brush your teeth and wipe your butt and vacuum the floor and all that? There is so much to enjoy and explore, a lot of it within. My own life can start to feel narrowed down by the space I dwell in. So, while they are teaching me the gift of the limitless being, I help them understand the beauty of boundary (this world, this time, this body) that can give shape to that wild magic. The boundless and the ordinary. They go hand in hand. We can teach each other how to keep them in balance. 

We need each other’s help, but I have to say I hate it when people say “don’t wish your life away,” or “enjoy every moment because they’ll soon be gone.” These sentiments are not untrue–they are an understanding these folks reached experientially that their audience also has to reach experientially. As much as I love words, I have been experimenting lately with “show, don’t tell”--following my kids’ lead and just inhabiting my own life, parenting by exhibiting the trial and error of finding a path worth taking. I think I want my legacy to be this hand-scratched, tattered, faded, folded-a-million-times-over road map. I am coming around to the idea that my wordless walking of the path is what is going to be the most helpful thing. 

In all this, I’m not saying that you have to be a parent in order to be awake to the beauty of life. For what it’s worth, I am arguing that this is a piece of the seemingly-inexplicable motivation that keeps parents doing the hard work even when it’s so very very hard. A child’s wonder of the ordinary in the groundedness of the present is a transformative gift that can drive the persistence of parenting. The good news for us all is that this child-sense exists in each of us (even though it may feel hard to access sometimes). It is our inner identity: it is the heart of joy, and it never grows old. It stays young and flexible and open even within the scaffolding of adult life. And there are many ways to return to it, to build a home there, to dwell there. My kids are one of my paths in, at present. And art is a way that I explore the landscape and keep the paths in and out well-trod and cleared of debris. But I firmly believe that for all of us, practicing presence is a universal must-have for living an expansive life. It is the effortless art of the child, and each of us houses just such a child, ready at any moment to dive into those waters with abandon.

Failure

Failure,

maybe you can be 

my friend?

Maybe you are a hand

extended to say “you must be

connected.”

Failure,

maybe you 

are that bridge

that keeps me united with my need 

for something greater that 

keeps me in

my reality here now 

that joins me to a friend by vulnerability

apology

solidarity.

Failure,

maybe you’re just a door to the 

Next Thing.

The next experience or exploration.

I go through you and 

discover

something new about God

the world 

me

my spouse and friends and kids

and the nature of humanity

and love

and eternity.

Maybe if I don’t turn the handle

but smash myself against your frame,

these encounters won’t mean much.

But

if I push through you instead of against you

maybe 

I’ll find myself in a new space

where there are discoveries and

possibilities

and failures which are yet more of the same entryways

to be passed through.

Failure,

maybe we can embrace

rather than crash together.

Maybe I can be molded by you rather than crushed–

the way one is by a hug.

You fit yourself into the shape of an embrace.

You can.

It’s all choices, isn’t it?

And I have the power

to choose

to move 

my body

with your reality.

I can be concussed by impact or

collapse against you.

surrender

and recognize and let 

my weight

move you open to new spaces.

Failure:

maybe you could be my friend

not my foe. 

What could this partnership mean? 

What could that give to me–

changed 

altered

grown life?

Death 

after death

after death–

these deaths are doors.

I want to be a house

of rooms opening and opening and opening

Meaning in a Name

My name means “victory,” and boy have I taken that to heart. Unfortunately, not as much for the achievements I’ve made as for the striving towards victory that marks the years, the weeks, the days and hours of my life. Winning–I’ve never put so fine a point on it but yes, winning is the goal. This is a discovery to me, so bear with me. I’m not a competitive person so I don’t tend to associate myself with a drive to win. But I guess I am fiercely competitive with myself–if that’s a thing. Who are the opponents? Hypothetically my lesser and my better self, and I’ll be damned if the former wins out. This posture towards life is starting to butt heads with reality, after all these years. It’s been a good run (has it, Laura?). But especially as I contemplate time more and more, I’m starting to question all this fighting for a better me. 

I spend so much time on self-improvement: my life is full of the physical, mental, spiritual, and relational avenues I employ to make me better. A better wife, mother, daughter, friend; homemaker, thinker, writer, teacher, gardner, graphic designer, communicator, baker. And sometimes I make it! Sometimes I reach new heights and I feel so powerful. So in control. So Hopeful. So worthy. (Is my Enneagram 2, strong 1-wing showing?) 

And then, I gain back ten of the pounds I worked away. I lose connection to a friend who moves away after years of intentional friendship. I spend time studying theologians and philosophies that later I must re-examine and unlearn. We make headway on credit card debt and three major appliances break down in one year. For a life so focused on working hard to achieve and overcome, such set-backs and circumstances (hello, pandemic), are confusing at best and debilitating at worst. 

As I obsess over the concept of time, I have found myself supremely frustrated by the pervasive trend to focus life on learning, growing, and working towards the you of the future–only to arrive at middle-age having never reached that goal and in many cases, facing a change to the goal entirely. Why is it that so many artists break into their field in their 40s and 50s? Doesn’t that seem a waste–all that time not practicing or enjoying their pinnacle of self? 

I realize with supreme consternation that I have bought into this modus operandi and it (and I, admittedly) need a major overhaul. With so little in our actual power or control (if you didn’t know it pre-2020, maybe you do now…or maybe, like me, you’ve chosen to look the other way), there has to be a different definition of “victory”--a different end goal for the value of a life. 

I think of the version of victory defined by Jesus’ life. He invited defeat more than any other human would dare. And yet, he wasn’t really trying to lose, per se. It wasn’t due to a lack of intention or hard work or desire, but he was operating in a value system that was so other from the cultural waters he was swimming in that what he achieved looked like losing (and he did lose to be sure–family, home, friends, physical security, his life, even his connection to God at one point). The things he focused on turned the concept of “winning” on its head–introducing to our world what we can only perceive as a paradox: strength in weakness; Victory in defeat. 

As I wonder about his other-worldly course through life on earth, I realize how often his work was focused on tangible, sensory, physical needs. Connection. Physical wholeness. Food and drink and solitude and friendship. These parts of being human are the things that ground us in our moments. The loneliness that draws us to reach out to a friend. The pangs that send us to seek food. The labor that depletes our resources and leads us to rest. 

Be present in the moment. The journey is the only destination. With great annoyance, I recall the hundreds of times I’ve heard or read this concept. I’ve always taken it in with a serious expression–”yes, yes, of course, how wise”--but I’ve always had one hand in my pocket furiously typing into a metaphorical calculator, tallying up the cost. 

And what is the cost? Control. Power. Pride. Stability. All a kind of manufactured sort but oh, how real the mirage looks! If I’m being honest with myself, I’d say that I believe what I receive can only come through my hard work. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I’ve still held on to this thread of belief that I’m on my own here. I’m afraid to let it go. 

So why am I contemplating all this? Because I’m standing here at a kind of intellectual precipice and taking stock, and I’m not terribly satisfied with what’s in the storeroom. I have a great deal of friendships that have come and gone, despite my fervent and loyal attentions, and starting over (yet again!) exhausts me on every level. I have a deeply-chosen career as a mom and teacher that I’m resenting like it’s an involuntary prison sentence. I have a strong body that waxes and wanes regardless of my best efforts (efforts which suck up a lot of time). I have a gift as an artist that I won’t dare to engage because I don’t see a viable path towards achievement in the field. And there’s the simple truth of it all. I am tired of this paralyzing tension between what I have and what I want. Just working harder hasn’t seemed to do the trick.

It’s time to redefine victory for myself. I need to come up with something because I have, in fact, reached middle age and I haven’t achieved the goals I wanted to and I am finding they may be changing anyway and I’m at a crossroads here. I can just make a new set of goals and plug along as I have been, or I can jump shark and join a new, seemingly paradoxical, worldview. Where trying a new recipe just for myself is victory, even if I never add it to our weekly meal rotation. Where teaching my son to read is victory, even if we don’t end up being life-long homeschoolers. Where spending time and money on a date night is victory, even if all we do is sit in each other’s presence in exhausted silence. Where writing this blog post is victory, even if it’s not building a platform to make me rich and famous. 

Maybe the new definition is victory as be-ing. Simply absorbing the human experience through my physical self—and that is found in actual present moments, not behind or beyond. 

My name means victory. That fact remains the same regardless of which definition I choose. And I hope that means that no matter what, I am won. That my worth doesn’t lie in any of these years and days and moments, no matter what fills them. That I am free to wrestle and wonder (and get it very, very wrong) because I am desperately, wholly, unendingly loved for who I am: Laura.

Learning from Moss

I was walking my favorite greenway in Greensboro on a gray winter’s morning when I sharply came into focus on something–not new, but newly apparent to my eyes. All along the wooded path, moss was growing: deeply green and vibrant, stark against the dull hues of the season. It was a bright signal of some alternative aspect I hadn't yet considered. Some new thought to introduce to my wondering about winter and its slow progress and the (perhaps grace-filled?) boundaries of Time. I resolved to submit a query to the internet god: Google

“How does moss survive the winter?” Here is some of what I have discovered about moss: 

It doesn’t have roots; rather, something called rhizoids. They are shallow and hairlike and can draw up nutrients from the soil but are not the plant’s only way of being fed. Their main function is apparently to anchor the plant, but they are easily pulled away. Stable, yet moveable. 

Moss is resilient. When it’s cold, it produces its own anti-freeze and pauses some processes to wait out winter. Also, if it gets too dry, it goes dormant–hibernating, if you will. Just a little bit of water can rehydrate and reanimate brown, dried up moss. It can survive far more extreme temperatures than most other plants. It is hardy and adaptable.

Moss thrives on the water it can glean from its environment. It is very slow growing–its speed ebbing and flowing with the availability of water. It’s okay with waiting, and this is perhaps the primary aspect that draws my mind towards it with wonder.

I arrived at my most recent counseling session feeling very unsettled, unmoored, at a loss about what I was thinking, feeling, and experiencing. During a brainspotting session, I saw a vision of myself in the midst of a vast sandy beach, no edges in sight, standing on a small boulder that rose above the expanse. As I contemplated that, I got a sense that I had been trying to find stability in any number of things in my life–friendships and relationships and plans and health etc.--but those things hadn’t been strong or reliable enough to bear me up. The rock was meant to signify a foundation that never moves or sinks: my connection to the Divine, I gathered. As I lingered in that mental place, I later saw myself somehow fused with the rock so that I could move freely across the beach, experiencing different parts of that landscape but always safe and stable. It was a helpful image, and a reminder that if I place my entire weight on any changeable person or thing, I am going to eventually get pulled under. I must figure out something to put my weight on that can bear it–a human quest, I feel. One we are all seeking in our own ways. 

This practice and its vision were helpful, but I rather prefer the metaphor of the moss. I like the idea of having permission to be rooted where I am, but not permanently so or in a way that is wholly dependent. Because the things to which I attach myself here are not bad, dangerous, or wrong to rely on. They can be a source of nourishment, as long as they are not the only source. Like moss, in seasons, I will be fed more than others, but perhaps the right nourishment can go a long way, allowing me to withstand lack or extremity. 

It does feel like a danger of existing in this world (and trying to figure out how to thrive here) is airing too much on one of those sides of the coin: being as rooted as possible in a good life that we design or discover, or unattaching from all things so that we may be protected from the changing of the resources available to us. The former is not as reliable as we think, but if we adopt the latter, we miss out on absorbing the richness and beauty that we have Divine, joyful encouragement to attach to. 

I want to be moss-like. It doesn’t grow tall, but it beautifully functions within the element of time that we’re all bound by. It may dry out. It may grow at a barely perceptible rate (so slow it seems to stop at times), but it’s persistent and resilient. It’s good at waiting. It’s good at existing where it is. Drawing up goodness, weathering the passage of time and what it brings, living on. 

What would it mean to stop fighting against time? Instead of jittering nervously at the gate like a racehorse about to burst through, what if I accepted the movement of time as it is right now, where it is right now, and assumed that it had something to give me rather than believing that all the gifts I have to receive are beyond this moment? 

What does this moment in time have to give me? Where is the beauty and substance I can draw upward to nourish me? What can I hold and process within that I’ve already received, as I wait to receive more? In the spirit of “the journey is the destination”: how am I meant to grow, not as I wait for something to happen, but as I acknowledge what is happening right now? Maybe someday (even someday soon!) I’ll feel movement in my life. Maybe the pace of life will pick up and I’ll experience that rocketing forward of dreams into reality. But my growth as a person, my gathering of experience and knowledge and value, isn’t actually dependent on that happening. It’s happening now. I can attach myself to this moment and absorb. I can also choose to ignore it (because I’m not a plant), but it’s going to happen either way. I think that if I pay attention, I may find that this moment is deeply nourishing and enriching and that this pace is a profound gift. Where growth happens. Where life happens, in fact. Where I am becoming, with every second. And if I rush on to the next thing, I will not be what I could have been. 

Time

Let me share something with you that recently entered my brain by “chance” (is there such thing?) and has been wreaking havoc there ever since: 

“...there is something about our embodiedness and about the kinds of exchange that the bodies have, which is intrinsic to intelligence itself. Or at least–put it a little less loadedly–what we would have to mean by intelligence would have to be very different were it not so involved in the exchange and confrontation and encounter of bodies and therefore with the taking of time. The dream so often seems to reduce to that persistent aspiration that there could be ways of knowledge, ways of knowing, ways of mastery, which didn’t depend on the contingencies of taking time. On the labor of finding one's way around and indeed therefore on the difficulty of inhabiting our environment. And that’s one of the last points I want to underline here: difficulty. I think difficulty is good for us. And I say that….because difficulty is one of those things which obliges us to take time. Rather obviously. The more time we take, the more our discovery is likely to turn into habit and inhabiting. The less time we take, the easier we find something to resolve, map, and digest, the less value, the less significance it will have. It’s actually rather an old chestnut. Platonic philosophers and early Christian theologians were saying millennia ago that the more easily you’ve thought you’ve got to know something, the less you care about it. Difficulty imposes a discipline. It imposes a willingness to believe that there is more to work on. And in that sense, also, of course, by reminding us that getting to where we are has taken time, it can also be one of those things that reminds us that our cultural perspective, temporal or geographical, is not the only obvious one. Taking time, the awareness of the more that we have not yet absorbed, may be one of the things (may be–it doesn’t absolutely have to be–but it may be one of the things) that gives us that little bit more patience with the criticism, the challenge, the alternative view of another world, another culture, another person. It may be mysteriously one of those things that builds solidarity rather than division. In other words, that extends the cooperation that properly belongs to knowledge” (“The Tree of Knowledge: Bodies, Minds and Thoughts,” Rowan Williams  [transcription and emphasis mine]).

If you read my blog post regarding the pace of winter and my difficulty with it (entitled “Fallow Time”), you know I’ve been struggling with the passage of time and its limitations. Hearing Williams’ words put a kind of immediate halt to the way I was thinking about the movement of my life and my response to it. I have felt stuck of late, and therefore longed for a “getting on with it” kind of zipping ahead on the many dormant things in my life: work, art, calling, ministry etc.

Williams’ contemplation about body, knowledge, time, and difficulty in this talk (which anyone can randomly search out on Youtube, as I did), suddenly introduced to me a clarity about the enormous gift of the limitation of time. To contemplate that I, a designed-physical body, was intentionally meant to exist within this boundary has caused me to consider that perhaps it’s not a curse after all, but a very purposeful grace. I cannot affect time’s movement, but only experience and exist within it. And there seems to be something quite imperative about that fact.

Since hearing those words, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about time. It’s not actually a prison, is it? Rather, it’s a vehicle. It’s one of the primary vehicles that humanity uses to travel through this finite world. It keeps us oriented to our place in the cosmos. It’s a magnetic force grounding us so that we will not float away, unattached. Moments, the smallest unit of the passage of time, keep us steadily in place. 

I have hated Time for most of my life because of the second half of Williams’ equation: The difficulty. To be held fast by time means to have to face every single thing that enters our sphere until that thing passes. My hatred of time really has been a hatred of the difficulty I have experienced. I have spent far little of the time of my life appreciating these difficulties. I think now of the repeated rejection I experienced as a child and young adult, and of how it split open my heart. Ragged and bloody, it widened and tenderized so that I eagerly became a place that other rejected souls might find waiting for them with welcome.

I think too of longing for a biological baby and never having one–and how those lines I cast out into the ether never caught what I aimed for. But when I reeled in the cords, I found myself connected to a random and beautiful group of people I never knew existed. Others who also knew the life-long ache of infertility and loss, including the family that we would become forever connected to via adoption. 

And I think about the deep, dark place of becoming a mom of three under two.

(you’re not supposed to say this aloud, so I’ll do it for you: parenting can be quicksand. It can pull you under suddenly, when you thought you were walking on solid ground, and struggling does you no good in saving you from suffocation. It closes in on you. It becomes the only thing around you. And it can slowly kill you. This is why you must never ever go it alone)

I was immediately drowning when I brought those two babies home and I did not feel solid ground under my feet for at least a year–even then, it was a tiptoe kind of standing–exhausting and uncertain. The gifts of not only my three kids, but of having them at the time, in the order and spacing that I did, forced me to know myself at last. To recognize my deadly need for human approval and my back-breaking drive to maintain the love of others by sacrifice and service. I was forced to separate from those tethers because they could not hold in the storm of three babies, then three toddlers. And I finally became free. It’s a freedom I fight hard to maintain every day now. I was not going to go willingly into that liberation, and probably not ever in my own interest alone. I accepted the dive into these waters for the love of my babies and my husband and found only later that I could keep doing it for love of myself. 

Something else may have introduced that freedom to me eventually, but the point is, I am speaking of time and difficulty seems to be intrinsically linked here, as Williams has pointed out. It is an inevitable aspect of the construct. Time is made of beauty and suffering. They are melded together. We try to separate them–it’s one of the many impossible tensions we fail to maintain as humans (but not for lack of trying). 

I am waking up to the beauty of time. It’s very slow and it painstakingly comes and goes like drifting in and out of the dream world. I am reminded of that story from the Book of Virtues, about a boy with a magical ball of thread that, once pulled, leaps him forward in time. He cannot leap backwards, once he has made that choice. He cannot make up for that decision—go back and glean what he chose to leave behind. I always felt so horrified by this story–a deep disturbance I couldn’t express at the unrectifiable regret therein. Thankfully, none of us have that ability to move time forward. We are protected from such devastating loss. We try to grasp that power and instead, end up holding an imitation of it called distraction. We pretend to exit time by ignoring it. We look up and realize that our loved one has been talking for several minutes but we don’t know what words they were saying. We can block out the things that our world is offering our senses, put up shields to experiences with nature and people alike. We can make choices that stymie the effects of time, though not alter its inevitabilities.  

We do need the relief of a bird’s eye view sometimes. And that, may I argue, is in large part the function of art. Poetry. Movies. Plays. Paintings. Music. Liturgy. We feel like we can transcend time in those spaces. It is a beautiful gift: the opportunity to jump ship without ever actually leaving. It gives us perspective and, if we let it, grace. 

The longest shortest time. What a perceptible phrase. Life crawls on at the speed of light. I still don’t like it–where I am right now in the flow of time. I want things to change. There are some dreams that haven’t come to fruition that I am still longing for, and I feel a deep and grace-filled permission to do so. But I am trying now to slow myself down to the presence of my physical form. To match pace with my whole self so that I don’t miss life as I wait for it to happen.

Fragile

I had a thought last night as I was falling asleep. I imagined God–Jesus, really–as a blossom with paper-thin, purple petals. And I thought: he was actually fragile like this. He chose fragility. He chose a form in which he could be crushed instantaneously without the ability to fight back. He was subjected to all the madness of this world. That feels so significant. It says to me that he is not dismissive of our physical world, or poised to rain down fire and obliterate it. Instead, he chose presence. I can’t tell you exactly what he is communicating through this, but these days, I do wonder if it suggests that rescue from hardship and suffering is not his ultimate goal for us or our world at this moment in time. It's a hard and enigmatic idea, this. Maybe you even find it abhorrent. If you’re reading, I hope you trust that I understand and feel that feeling, too.    

As parents, we sometimes hold our kids down while a bone is being set, or stitches are put into place, or peroxide is poured into a wound. We hold our kids while fever or disease ravages their bodies–as they scream in pain or as they sit comatose unable to process trauma. We hold them and we wish for all the bad to go away–all the abusers to die immediately and all the sharp and dangerous things to be blunted and all the impossibilities to be made possible. We long for these things. Sometimes we don’t do them because we’re powerless. Sometimes it’s because we aren’t strong enough or aware enough or–God forbid, but yes–selfless enough. There are a myriad of reasons. In the parent metaphor transferred, we assume God does the same for the same reasons–he isn’t aware enough or powerful enough or loving enough. It’s our experience so it’s all we can imagine. This infuriates us and leaves us deeply unsatisfied. 

Coming back to this question of fragility, and God’s apparently unconventional way of being Deity, I wonder if this perspective could be turned on its head? What if his current posture towards the world is because he is too strong, too aware, too loving? What if it’s not a lack but an overabundance that leads to things going on as they are? We all want to believe we are worthy and deserving of salvation. When we call for justice, we don’t usually mean upon ourselves. But in the hypothetical scenario in which none of us are worthy of grace–if, as God says, to him murder is the same as hatred, and we hate Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Rush Limbaugh or Ruth Baden Ginsburg, then we all have to go. Could it be his over-kindness that keeps our world spinning as is? And so–and so–and so–we suffer. And he hates it. But love stays his hand.

What can a God like that do before his New promised Creation comes, then? He can choose fragility and come next to us. He can come into our physical world and eat food that tastes bad and let fever ravage his body and wonder where he will sleep at night and get lost from his parents and be rejected by his brothers and neighbors and be dismissed. He can be whipped. Stones thrown at him. Experience hunger. Have no one to trust but God alone. Be utterly misunderstood by those closest to him. Have nails drive through his skin and take on weight that wasn’t his to bear and through all this, he can sidle up next to us and say: I see your loneliness. Pain. Grief. Uncertainty. Confusion. Fear. Hatred. Mockery. Rejection. Darkness. He has entered our experience. 

It’s not a perfect answer for the doubts. I still don’t know how to make sense of it all. Many times, I’ve been in a place where any of the musings above would have entered my brain bitter and damaging as poison. So if you have stuck it out through this verbal wrestling, I thank you for your patience and trust. I have no answers to give anyone, but what I can say with authority is that this concept of the fragile God utterly captures me. It has arrested me and I haven’t been able to liberate myself from it. To date, I have discovered no safer place for my fears and griefs than to be nestled next to this Someone who is so empathetic they would risk what I risk in order to love me. I can’t escape the wonder of that. Frankly, it sustains me through doubts and liberates me to scream obscenities at him (sometimes for years at a time) because I feel safe from anything within that love. I feel a kind of acceptance in this place that has been too compelling to walk away from. It hasn’t stopped me from keeping bags packed at the door. Even walking through it sometimes. In the mornings, sometimes fainter than others, I can feel him moving about in the home of my heart saying “I’m glad to see you today.” And then…I don’t know. I just stay a little longer.

Fallow Time

This is not as common an experience in this day and age, but winter once widely demanded a ceasing from much of the work that occupied human life. I’m thinking of agricultural or nomadic lifestyles, I suppose, and the impact of winter on planting, harvesting, and foraging. My sister recently remarked on this fallow-like state of the season while we watched a period farming drama and observed the changes the farmers experienced to their life rhythms in wintertime. It got me thinking.

Most of us are not dependent on the natural season to dictate the kind of work we do or have available to us, and I think that’s why we have come to have an expectation that the season’s changes won’t, or even shouldn’t, have an effect on us. I hear this reality in the widespread panic when the time change occurs that quickens and elongates the darkness of night. For weeks and weeks, we comment on it, incredulous–no, offended–by its audacity to return again another year. I also feel this reality in my life as a kind of disorienting confusion about the disruption of winter on established routines and rhythms. Since November, I have been scrambling to find new footing in old routines, rather than surrendering to new ones. (My awareness of this fact has brought little effect). 

Cold causes things to slow down. To pause. To freeze in time–or rather, to freeze through time. It makes unavailable some of the resources, opportunities, and abilities we once had access to. In winter, we are working with a new deck, as it were–I think more than any other season–so it would follow that the game must be set and played differently for a time. And yet I feel myself pushed to maintain life at a consistent pace, rhythm, and expectation year-round. In some ways, we’ve created artificial things to make up for what is lost. This only adds to my mental confusion as I exist in seasonal limbo, because they never quite succeed in maintaining the old norm. Something’s always off-kilter.

What might I miss by living a summer life in a winter season? What value is there in frozen stasis if I could accept it as good, natural, or right, instead of labeling it laziness or waste and therefore avoid it furiously? What does it mean to live a winter life? I find myself wondering: What do trees do in winter? Do they cease to grow? No–rather, they focus their growth into slow cultivation of the essential new for the coming spring. They germinate slowly and secretly–the way a baby grows in utero. They are progressing, though unseen. They are alive, though something more than the five senses must be used to detect this. This kind of cultivation requires something internal and instinctive. Maybe even spiritual. Winter growth is felt within the particular being and is not something that can be evidenced or effectively shared. It’s intimate and personal. They require particular gentleness and care, these embryonic, microscopic things–things this world can quickly trample in its dashing about. We are not taught to cherish this stage, and yet it must come before any developed entity. Our roughness harms the things that we want to grow because we refuse them their essential processes. We hurry them up, and they are sometimes even killed by a pace they were never meant to keep. 

These are the things I’m considering in this winter of my personal and family life. They’re intimate and personal, our plans, hopes, and desires. Though evidence of them is yet unseen, they exist in an embryonic state that is the first stage of growth. I am tired of waiting on them, but since they are not here, this could be the reason: it’s not spring yet. And they may never come if I cannot respect their pace of growth. 

Here’s the rub: our winter seasons don’t always align with the one happening outside our window. Winter seasons can come at any time, really, influenced by internal and external environments. Maybe winter came early and is staying longer because of loss, confusion, or grief. And though I can get on board (I don’t like to, but I’m capable of it) with the prescription of rest, gentleness, fallowness, and quiet waiting in wintertime, the lack of end-date on that is particularly panic-inducing. Panic tends to disrupt rest. So here I am, sitting in the middle of all these reluctant thoughts about the beauty and value of winter while struggling with the doubt that it will ever end, and all the ensuing implications. 

If all I can do is take cues from the natural world (the only observable suggestion for some of these doubts), I have to admit that I am repeatedly shown that winter does, in fact, come to an end. I have seen for three years now that those fuzzy buds on the Tulip Trees lining my driveway will break open. They’ve been there all winter with no observable change, but every year they are suddenly, startlingly there, deeply purple and vibrating with pre-blossoming energy. To date, they’ve never failed me. I’ve looked around, and I have to tell you, that’s the nearest thing to a promise I’ve found. And in these lingering dark days, it’s the pinprick of light I’m heading towards.

Thank God for Parents Who Swear

I mean this figuratively, in that this is a stand-in descriptor for "authentic, all-out-there, gritty, messy parents," but I absolutely also mean this literally.

Thank you, God, for parents who swear. In public. About their kids. In front of me.

This grateful thought escaped my mind heavenward as I drove my kids to a playdate, my mind otherwise plagued with the repeated message "Maybe I'm just not cut out for this parenting thing." It had been a really rough morning, and I had spent half of it yelling at my kids, another quarter of it being sarcastic and degrading to them, and the last quarter (to be generous with myself) apologizing for being such an asshole to them. Sometimes I tell myself that if I can't be a caring, patient, loving parent, the least I can do for my kids is model repentance, but I'm not so sure it was making much of an impact that day in the small servings I was dishing up.

"Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I'm not cut out for this." It's a paralyzing thought. Because what if it's true, and I'm in neck deep, and there's nothing I can do about it now. What if I made a horrible mistake that's going to haunt these kids for the rest of their earth-bound existence?

I began to contemplate: "If I'm not made for parenting, what kind of person is?" It took me back several weeks to a conversation that I had with my oldest over breakfast. It was during Lent and we were doing a daily scriptural reading provided by the children's ministry at our church--he asked about a word that kept popping up: "sinner."

"Mom, what is a sinner?"

I wish I could remember the whole conversation to share it verbatim, but as I recall, I asked him (buying time as I scrambled to find a fit answer) what he thought a sinner was. He responded meanderingly that it was a bad guy because they did bad things. I asked him if he ever did things he shouldn't do and when he honestly responded "yes," I asked him if he was a bad guy. He was thoughtful about it. "No," he decided. "So, I guess being a sinner just means being a human." And then, I didn't need to find an answer for him anymore. His childlike mind had grasped the concept far better than mine.

So, maybe the answer to my question about parenting uses a similar kind of logic. This to say that maybe the role of parent isn't something earned but something more basic and inherent. Maybe the answer to my question "What kind of person is made for parenting?" is simply: a human one. This has implications I haven't fully prepared for, doesn't it? I have an inkling of this because of our 7 years of unsuccessful attempts at procreation, which led to the adoption of our kids. I don't really mean to say that all humans are parents, but that all parents are human.

This imperfect argument brought me a small measure of solace that day. Maybe, just maybe, my unearned status as mother of these kids meant that I belonged where I found myself. That I did "have what it takes" because "what it takes" is a basic requirement that I was never responsible for in the first place.

Forgive this flawed contemplation, wondered at amongst the chaos of parenting three kids 5 and under. I had this thought while furiously putting my 3 year old's shoes and socks on for the fifth time that morning ("STOP TAKING THEM OFF," I had yelled). Essentially, the hope I was grasping at was that I could bring the self that I was--desperate, needy, flawed, terribly human--to my parenting and find that I did in fact belong there.

To return to my earlier point: I do find it hard to believe these comforting things when it seems I'm surrounded by parents whose kids eat healthy snacks and barely know what a screen is (let alone "screen-time"); who aren't scrolling through Facebook on their phones during playtime, and who speak to their children in dulcet tones even when they are being monsters. Parents who don't swear. I guess I try to believe my friends when they say that they feel what I do: frustration and rage at their tiny humans or debilitating inadequacy. But I have this superpower of holding myself to a standard about 1,000 levels above anything I require of anyone else on the planet so it's truly hard for me, personally, to believe we are experiencing the same things unless I actually see the evidence. And what I see are smart, sweet kids secure in the patient love of their enduring, self-sacrificing parents. Sometimes I mutter under my breath at my kids, "geez, quit being a dick." I've never heard a single one of my parent friends do that. So who's the outlier here?

I'm not advocating that we all scream at our kids in public. That we grab their wrists and drag them to the car. That we follow my example by shoving shoes on their feet, grumbling at them through gritted teeth. That we yank them about or scream "you little shit!" into their ears. Don't hear that, OK? This is what I really mean to say, after all this beating around the bush: Thank you, parents who swear.

Thank you for those brief and beautiful moments when in my company, you let escape the inner lives we all hide from the public. The exasperated sighs. Your head held in your hands, giving up for a moment. The tears. The "ef word" in association with your precious baby. The ungratefulness about parenting that those of us in the infertility community especially try to avoid--found in admittances about the losses that come with parenting, rather than a constant focus on the gains. For the most part, I try to keep these things hidden as well, but especially under recent stressors in our family life, it feels like I've lost the capacity to keep my humanity under wraps. On the particular day I'm referencing, I literally stomped my foot like a child at my 3-year old, gutturally issuing his name in a tone that came from previously unknown depths, in front of my friend and her kids. I hissed at him that he had "cried enough," that I was "done with that." Most of the time, I feel so alone in my humanity, especially as a parent. The rage and inadequacy is crushing, but the shame--oh the shame is debilitating. It's downright paralyzing.

When you share the lows with me, I can believe we are fellow travelers and that I am not, in fact, on a far lower and darker road than everyone else. It helps me believe that if our lows are similar, then perhaps our highs are, too, and that it's possible my kids are also smart, sweet, and secure in the patient love of enduring, self-sacrificing parents. (Or, at least, that they are secure in the hands of a gracious God, the true enduring and self-sacrificing parent, that will fill in the gaping holes left by my lackluster attempts.) When you snap at your kids or swear liberally about them behind your hand at our playdates, you give me hope that I'm not alone. You throw me a lifeline that keeps me from drowning in my own failure. So thank you for being vulnerable and human in front of me. Thank you for swearing.

It Bears Repeating

Jacob Blake. 

I have to say his name somewhere other than my own head, my own heart, my own home. I have to write today even though I don’t know what I’m going to say, even though I don’t know if anyone will read this and I’m pretty sure it will matter very little to anyone but me. I’ve been reading and listening of late rather than talking and writing. But I have to write today because I have to say out loud that silence is no longer my stance. This is not a temporary decision. It has to be indefinite. That “middle ground,” that “neutral space” in which I used to stand never was such a thing. It doesn’t exist. These things bear repeating.

This week as I moved within the confines of my pandemic-flavored domestic life, I couldn’t shake the phrase “I helped to build this world.” My own culpability in perpetuating the plague of racism is painfully near these days. For the past month, I’ve been reading Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise with a group of folks from my local parish in a class about racial justice. About every week, we’ve been led in a discussion about our experience with the reading. And about every week, I’ve signed off from that call with my heart heavy and my head in my hands, trying to recover some hope in my heart and breath in my lungs. The reality of this situation—not just in our country, but deep in church history—is a weighty grief and it’s time for me to feel it. But God, it hurts.

No one is off the hook, I keep realizing as I read an account of one missed opportunity after another when the Gospel could have brought transformation, but the Church chose compliance and comfort instead. No one is off the hook. Not even me. It’s worth recognizing that this wound of grief from which I’m suffering is not a new affliction. I always bore it in my body, as we all do when the body of humanity has been hurt. But the society I live in, that I have helped to build, has allowed me to avoid it: at the same time, this same system has daily dug into the wound of my brothers and sisters of color. 

This week has been particularly difficult as I process anti-racist reading, the shooting and paralyzation of Jacob Blake, and my own failure as a parent. Some of my consolation in this season has been in my power to affect my own family—to raise my children to be better people than I am and have been. As I have blatantly and repeatedly failed them this week—losing patience, nursing selfishness, yelling, yelling, recognizing my sin and yelling again anyway—I have realized with overwhelming pain and fear this paradox: how can a broken and sinful person who can’t even make herself better manage to build something better than herself? 

These are the realities of my world and my life at the moment. There still is no justice for Breonna Taylor or Elijah McClain and even as people protest in the streets for Jacob Blake, my heart has no hope for him, either. These names are in my heart and head all the time, and I long to send them away. I don’t want to feel the desperate rage and grief of justice denied. And so I have to write today. Even though I have nothing new to say. Even though my voice reaches such an insignificant perimeter of exposure. I have to hold their stories in my body especially because I don’t want to be near them. I want to drift back into my privileged “peace” and “equilibrium" of recent past--it is always available to me, and yet never available to Black and Brown lives. I have to say these things out loud to myself: No. Never again. It bears repeating.

“Thinking of a day

I won’t see a face on another t-shirt

I know it’s bad, but it hurts

Same day, new face

Old pain, rerun

Headline, heartbreak

Pray to God that peace will find me

Peace find me

Pray to God that he falls like lightening

Pray to God that he falls like lightening

Silence from the ones who know better

Quiet is the riot of the oppressor

Devil’s plan is we hate each other

Even better if we say nothing”

(“Lightening,” Pat Barrett and Harolddd) 

In the face of scarce hope, I find myself hungering to hear from the experts of hope: Christians of Color. I thank God for Jemar Tisby, for Austin Channing-Brown, for Rev. Esau McCaulley, for Lecrae, for Dr. King—for countless other voices that are so readily discounted and silenced, and yet have continued to speak. I have so much to learn from them, and I am thankful beyond words that they have not allowed oppression, racism, hatred to shut their hearts or mouths. It feels impossible to find hope in the face of such evidence to the contrary, but there is a vibrant legacy of just such a hope that I have been unaware of for so long. I am desperate to learn, now. 

Even as I hate the hurt, the pain, the struggle against despair, I pray that I can stay in the fight, that I won’t again be lulled to sleep by the voice of comfort. That I will come to love the tension where healing can happen. 

“But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth” (“Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. King).

Deflecting Becomes Reflecting

I saw a gif this morning that attempts to excuse white people from the sin of slavery by equating it with the expectation on current Japanese generation to apologize for Pearl Harbor. Of course it was shared on Facebook by someone I care about and consider a decent human being. “This is utterly missing the point,” I fumed. “What a cop out!” I thought immediately about a recent video I saw on YouTube by Phil Vischer entitled “Holy Post—Race in America” that quickly yet in great detail explains all manner of recent racial sins current white people are culpable for, but I knew how slim the chance that someone posting a gif like the former would give time or openness to a video like the latter. 

This was on my mind when I sat down to read scripture for the day. My reading schedule took me to a story in the gospels about Jesus casting out demons and then verbally sparring with religious leaders (Matthew 12, Mark 3, Luke 11). Then I hit Luke 11: 47-51 and knew it was connected to that gif and the spiritual origin of its damaging sentiment. Jesus is talking to the most powerful and respected people in Jewish society when he says, 

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them. So you testify that you approve of what your ancestors did; they killed the prophets, and you build their tombs. Because of this, God in his wisdom said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and others they will persecute.’ Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for it all.

It was the word “ancestors” that caught my eye. Jesus’ accusation here to the current generation of religious leaders is that they built tombs for those their ancestors murdered to show how apologetic and pious they were—to distance themselves from those actions—and yet, continued to do the same thing: distrust and kill prophets sent to them to speak truth and call them to repentance. In fact, later in the Gospels, they’ll do this same thing to Jesus. They did not kill the prophets their ancestors did, but by doing the very same thing in subsequent generations (while hiding behind false repentance and reparation), Jesus says that the sins of the past will not dissipate but heap upon them. Ultimately, they will end up being responsible for all of it because they knew what their ancestors did was wrong, and instead of stopping the cycle, they perpetuated it. They have tried to excuse themselves from the sin of the past by burying it. However, their recognition and apology for past sin has been for themselves rather than the offended. It has been a false repentance. And so those unrecognized sins are not staying in the past but growing and building. This is why current generations of white people are still responsible for slavery. Not because we actually owned slaves, but because as a group of people, our repentance of an ancestral sin has been a mask behind which we have hidden to continue that same sin, and benefit from it. We have used the Emancipation Proclamation as a tomb to bury the sins of the past rather than own, remember, repent, and change. 

I have never personally been asked to apologize for slavery. I am being asked to apologize for current sins of prejudice, racism, and apathy. We are feeling the weight of our ancestor’s sins because the tower of current racial sin has been built on the foundations that came before it—foundations we “buried” but did not dismantle. “Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for all.” 

Until we demolish this tower of sin from which we have ascended, we won’t be able to move away from the foundation we so desperately don’t want to be held accountable for. 

The Weakness of Jesus

Jesus began his life as a refugee. He was a fugitive from the murder that claimed the lives of so many other infants. The King claimed to want to honor and worship him but planned to snuff out his life. Jesus could not walk or talk before he was already fleeing the powerful who wanted to murder him because his power threatened theirs.

He began his life as a refugee but his troubles didn’t stop there by any means. 

His own hometown community rejected him. He was an outcast that wandered the world without a permanent place to call home.

Religious scholars and leaders who had studied, preached, waited for his arrival didn’t recognize him as the fulfillment of their longing. They disregarded, looked past, could not see his glory.

He was dismissed as a Nazarene. Marked as insignificant. 

A child bears the image of its father, whether physically or by the ingrained values, characteristics, idiosyncrasies mirrored from life together. How can Jesus recognize us if we have so distorted his image in us, and our lives so fail to bear the characteristics and values of his parentage that nothing and no one would connect us to him? 

The strong hated him. The powerful were threatened by him. The rich found their riches more lovable. The influential preferred their status to surrendering to his authority. The “things” they found themselves possessing were worth far more to them than the eternal gifts of the Father—the things that don’t burn up in the end; the things that bring us wholeness and restore us to our original design; the things that bring us victory over death. 

Jesus had no power. He barely had a place to lay his head. He did not own property of any kind. He barely knew where he was going to get his next meal. He didn’t have prestige. He touched lepers and spoke to adulteresses about to be stoned to death. It was always the small, dismissed, humble that he touched and elevated. The small town of Bethlehem where he was born. The shepherds who heralded his arrival. The widows who fed him. The children that gathered around him. The divorced Samaritan he spoke to as a familiar friend. 

The man was beaten nearly to death and asphyxiated on a symbol of treason and shame. He was humiliated, called names, reviled, spit at, hated, degraded. His body was robbed of life, and he never did receive justice for his murder.

This fugitive, this alienated outcast, this unrecognized, unvalued, rejected, despised, poor, homeless, powerless, possessionless, beaten, murdered, unjustly treated life is the very power source of the Gospel. It was through his life and ministry that connection to God was made possible for all (his followers and murderers alike).

It is through this kind of life that such things as welcome, humility, long-suffering, selflessness, trust, compassion, and hope arise and flourish.  

I declare that a follower of Jesus must bear the former to have the latter. And if life has not give those things to you, it isn’t Jesus who must transform to be like you (an insider with power and prestige and privilege and money and pride); it is you who must condescend to be like Jesus, the way Jesus condescended to be like us. We live by his example and bear his image the way a child mirrors their father. 

The father is the source of the image—not the other way around. What are the characteristics of “your” Jesus? How do they compare to the one described in scripture by the friends and followers who observed his life, death, and resurrection? 

God forgive me for looking nothing like your servant Jesus to the world around me.

Isaiah 53

Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.

After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light [of life] and be satisfied ; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.

Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

The Flame We Bear

Today’s reading takes me to John chapter 1. 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” 

that life was the light of mankind

The very life that was in Jesus was passed into us—us meaning every single human being. Every single human being has this divine life and dignity within us.

and the darkness has not overcome it.

Oh God that I could believe that. I look out into our world and it is hard to believe that. 

The darkness has not overcome it.

The darkness has not overcome it.

The darkness will not overcome it. 

This is our future, our destiny, our promise. The darkness will not overcome that life of Christ, passed generously to us so that we could share in it together. So that we could be one with one another and The One. 

There is no darkness that can overcome that light because “even the darkness will not be dark to you…the darkness is as light to you” (Psalm 139:12). 

That prevailing, effervescent, victorious, persistent, un-killable light was passed into us at creation. 

This flame was placed into our palms at the very beginning, along with freedom of choice in what to do next.  

How to make sense of this. How to make sense of those who possess this same light but whose lives pervade darkness; who use their power to snuff out the life of others? How to make sense of this. We are all the same. We want to be different from our oppressors, from those who hate and whom we hate. We all have this same source. How to make sense of this? The same fire that gives light can burn. How to make sense of this? I don’t feed it enough, it wanes; I feed it too much and it rages. 

Stay near, friends; stay near to the eternal flame. Let it feed the light that illuminates us, that connects us to the divine and to one another. I don’t know how to use this light wisely apart from following the example of its original source.

I have neglected to follow that Source’s 

Humility

Servant heart

Putting aside self interest

Bearing of others’ pain

Oneness with the poor, downtrodden, neglected, despised, unjustly treated (Philippians 2)

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. May I do better at bearing well the light you passed into me. 

The darkness has not overcome it. 

Rebuilding

About a week ago, I was sitting in my mother-in-law’s house chatting in the quiet hours of night after the kids went to bed. I was talking about the events of that rainy day and what the kids and I had gotten up to outside, wandering the woods and fields of her country property, exploring and getting as wet and muddy as possible. I told her that as I photographed some moments of the day, I found myself thinking about her late husband, who died about four years ago when our firstborn was only about eight months old. Her husband loved that property and cared for it well. He especially loved the small patch of forest behind the house, and just before he got sick, he had been slowly clearing a path through the woods—he, who had had several hip replacements yet didn’t let chronic pain stop him from meaningful labor. I had the privilege of walking down that path with him once—he pointed out to me one tree after another, talking about them as if they were his dear friends. He was aware of their history: how they had changed over the months or years, if one had been hit by pestilence or by lightening. He recognized them, knew them, the same way he could identify a bird simply by its flight pattern: he payed close attention. That path is long grown over now, but the memory of this vibrant, extraordinary man only grows more vivid. I cried as I told mom that I wished the kids and I could walk that path with him; they had never gotten to know him—what a missed opportunity worth mourning. As grief was made fresh in that moment, I thought anew about loss. We are bolstered, built, changed, transformed by love. And when we lose a precious life, we lose the opportunity to be changed, to be bettered, by that love. It’s a deeply personal loss. 

And then I immediately thought of Aumhad Aubrey. 

It is impossible to fathom the loss this world has experienced by the absence of this man’s love. What transformation might have been made in the lives of those near to him, and in the world by exponential impact? 

Even since the recent mourning of this man’s death, there has been yet another murder. His name is George Floyd. I am enraged. I am grieved. I feel lost, hopeless, fearful. Powerless. 

This morning, I started reading the biblical book of Nehemiah. Just in the first four chapters, I have been sobered and encouraged by his story and its part in the rebuilding of Jerusalem and God’s people. 

First of all, Nehemiah seems to be an ordinary man. Cupbearer for a king—a trusted position, but still a simple laborer. Not a prophet with a prophecy on his tongue, but with an essential commission from God nonetheless. He sees a need for change and is moved to personal action.

Then, of note, he starts his entire work of rebuilding with confession of his sins and the sins of God’s people: please forgive our failings, and be gracious to fulfill your promises despite our unworthiness.

It had been something like 150+ years since the walls had been destroyed, and 13 years since Ezra had been given the funds to rebuild the temple. What a monumental task, to rebuild this wall, this city, this people. To bring restoration, unity, and hope. Overwhelming. This is how it feels when I see what is happening in my country and wonder what I can do to affect change. In this pondering, I find Nehemiah chapters three and four moving and challenging. 

When rebuilding commences, small groups of people or individuals choose a starting point—a gate, or their district, or even a piece beside their house—and do what they can with it, often expanding to adjacent portions of the city. They are ridiculed as they work by those who are threatened by the strengthening of this people and their city. They face physical as well as emotional threat from these perpetrators who “plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and stir up trouble against it” (4:8). And yet, they pray, trust God, and “the people worked with all their heart” (4:6). 

This feels like a doable directive. Go outside your door, Laura, and rebuild the part of the wall that is in front of you. And when you finish that section, see what you can do about the part next to it, and next to it, and next to it. One brick at a time. 

I’m not a Bible teacher. I am not an activist. I haven’t done diligent anti-racist work. I have the luxury of “putting this out of my head” when it gets to be too much, and then I neglect to recognize that it is indeed a luxury. I don’t understand and can’t explain why these things continue when I know that my good and loving God is grieved and angered by the incalculable losses that are the lives of these recently murdered men. But as far as I can comprehend, God is passionate about defeating and healing from racism, and we have been called to participate in this essential work, without excuse. 

I want to start with the broken bricks at my own home. 

“Then I said to them, ‘You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.’ I also told them about the gracious hand of my God on me and what the king had said to me. They replied, ‘Let us start rebuilding.’ So they began this good work” (Nehemiah 2:17-18).